It might almost have seemed as if it was to meet this attack by anticipation that Colani wrote in 1864 his work, Jésus-Christ et les croyances messianiques de son temps.
Timothée Colani was born in 1824 at Lemé (Aisne), studied in Strassburg and became pastor there in 1851. In the year 1864 he was appointed Professor of Pastoral Theology in Strassburg in spite of some attempted opposition to the appointment on the part of the orthodox party in Paris, which was then growing in strength. The events of the year 1870 left him without a post. As he had no prospect of being called to a pastorate in France, he became a merchant. In consequence of some unfortunate business operations he lost all his property. In 1875 he obtained a post as librarian at the Sorbonne. He died in 1888.
How far was Jesus a Jew? That was the starting-point of Colani's study. According to him there was a complete lack of homogeneity in the Messianic hopes cherished by the Jewish people in the time of Jesus, since the prophetic conception, according to which the Kingdom of the Messiah belonged to the present world-order, and the apocalyptic, which transferred it to the future age, had not yet been brought into any kind of unity. The general expectation was focused rather upon the Forerunner than upon the Messiah. Jesus Himself in the first period of His public ministry, up to Mark viii., had never designated Himself as the Messiah, for the expression Son of Man carried no Messianic associations for the multitude. His fundamental thought was that of perfect communion with God; only little by little, as the success of the preaching of the Kingdom more and more impressed His mind, did His consciousness take on a Messianic colouring. In face of the undisciplined expectations of the people He constantly repeats in His parables of the growth of the Kingdom, the word “patience.” By revealing Himself as the Lord of this spiritual kingdom He makes an end of the oscillation between the sensuous and the spiritual in the current expectations of the future blessedness. He points to mankind as a whole, not merely to the chosen people, as the people of the Kingdom, and substitutes for the apocalyptic catastrophe an organic development. By His interpretation of Psalm cx., in Mark xii. 35-37, He makes known that the Messiah has nothing whatever to do with the Davidic kingship. It was only with difficulty that He came to resolve to accept the title of Messiah; He knew what a weight of national prejudices and national hopes hung upon it.
But He is “Messiah the Son of Man”; He created this expression in order thereby to make known His lowliness. In the moment in which He accepted the office He registered the resolve [pg 224] to suffer. His purpose is, to be the suffering, not the triumphant, Messiah. It is to the influence which His Passion exercises upon the souls of men that He looks for the firm establishment of His Kingdom.
This spiritual conception of the Kingdom cannot possibly be combined with the thought of a glorious Second Coming, for if Jesus had held this latter view He must necessarily have thought of the present life as only a kind of prologue to that second existence. Neither the Jewish, nor the Jewish-Christian eschatology as represented in the eschatological discourses in the Gospels, can, therefore, in Colani's opinion, belong to the preaching of Jesus. That He should sometimes have made use of the imagery associated with the Jewish expectations of the future is, of course, only natural. But the eschatology occupies far too important a place in the tradition of the preaching of Jesus to be explained as a mere symbolical mode of expression. It forms a substantial element of that preaching. A spiritualisation of it will not meet the case. Therefore, if the conviction has been arrived at on other grounds that Jesus' preaching did not follow the lines of Jewish eschatology, there is only one possible way of dealing with it, and that is by excising it from the text on critical grounds.
The only element in the preaching of Jesus which can, in Colani's opinion, be called in any sense “eschatological” was the conviction that there would be a wide extension of the Gospel even within the existing generation, that Gentiles should be admitted to the Kingdom, and that in consequence of the general want of receptivity towards the message of salvation, judgment should come upon the nations.
These views of Colani furnish him with a basis upon which to decide on the genuineness or otherwise of the eschatological discourses. Among the sayings put into the mouth of Jesus which must be rejected as impossible are: the promise, in the discourse at the sending forth of the Twelve, of the imminent coming of the Son of Man, Matt. x. 23; the promise to the disciples that they should sit upon twelve thrones judging the tribes of Israel, Matt. xix. 28; the saying about His return in Matt. xxiii. 39; the final eschatological saying at the Last Supper, Matt. xxvi. 29, “the Papias-like Chiliasm of which is unworthy of Jesus”; and the prediction of His coming on the clouds of heaven with which He closes His Messianic confession before the Council. The apocalyptic discourses in Mark xiii., Matt. xxiv., and Luke xxi. are interpolated. A Jewish-Christian apocalypse of the first century, probably composed before the destruction of Jerusalem, has been interwoven with a short exhortation which Jesus gave on the occasion when He predicted the destruction of the temple.
According to Colani, therefore, Jesus did not expect to come [pg 225] again from Heaven to complete His work. It was completed by His death, and the purpose of the coming of the Spirit was to make manifest its completion. Strauss and Renan had entered upon the path of explaining Jesus' preaching from the history of the time by the assumption of an intermixture in it of Jewish ideas, but it was now recognised “that this path is a cul-de-sac, and that criticism must turn round and get out of it as quickly as possible.”
The new feature of Colani's view was not so much the uncompromising rejection of eschatology as the clear recognition that its rejection was not a matter to be disposed of in a phrase or two, but necessitated a critical analysis of the text.
The systematic investigation of the Synoptic apocalypse was a contribution to criticism of the utmost importance.